If strict European agricultural standards could improve our food supply, many people will be worried that loose Chinese standards would hurt it.

China's Shuanghui International wants to buy US pork producer Smithfield Foods for $4.7bn, at a time of crisis around the quality of the worldwide food supply.

Never before have we had such thorough labeling and so little clarity on the provenance of our food – and that's when the US agriculture officials, supermarkets and grocers are left to their own devices. Consumers who are worried about pesticides, or hormones, or plastics, or bleaches – consumers who want to avoid chemical ills – are forced to play a guessing game every time they shop.

Our history of food safety in the United States has not been covered in glory. Grocers long ago realized that labeling is connected to pricing, so the labels on vacuum-packed food are often disastrously misleading, demonstrating how far we are from being able to verify the source of our cellophane-wrapped fish or meat.

Aside from pricing and choice, there are genuine health dangers that go unaddressed. The persistence of antibiotics and other disruptive additives to the diets of poultry and beef makes widespread distribution of meat a possibility, but is a clear health challenge to any consumer.

Abusive factory farming practices are so common that it took decades, until 2009, to ban meat producers from selling beef from "downer cows", which were too sick to stand. Activist videos have shown the beaks of chickens are sometimes burned off so they don't harm themselves, and they're sometimes cooped up with dead bird corpses, according to the New York Times.

That leaves aside the casual problems with oversight that have led to numerous salmonella outbreaks. There have also been protests against politically powerful agrichemical-maker Monsanto for its genetically modified seeds and a potential law that would make it legal to grow and sell such seeds even if they're proven to be harmful for humans.

These stories are passed down with the power of old epics, and they will reinforce the strong strain of already extant Sinophobia in the US government, which for over a decade has evinced a strong resistance to any Chinese companies owning a part of any regulated industry. The list of proposed Chinese acquisitions of US companies is long enough to have created diplomatic incidents between the two countries – particularly the hard-fought and bitter battle for control of technology provider 3Com. That ended shortly after the US Department of Defense released a report suggesting that the proposed acquirer, Huawei Technologies, was looking for a foothold for espionage. (3Com huffily relocated to Beijing in response.)

Some pundits have even theorized that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US has a thing against the Chinese.

"They have this feeling that CFIUS is something the US government uses against Chinese companies in particular," Janet Hui, cohead of the mergers and acquisitions practice at Beijing's Jun He Law Offices, told the American Lawyer last month. She went on: "There is a feeling that the US government is hostile to Chinese investors."

The American business community, when it tells the truth, is also distrustful of the Chinese influence in business. The Financial Times once reported that General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt said "I really worry about China. In the end I am not sure they want any of us to win, or to be successful." Before that, Immelt had said: "I look at my American colleagues, the hardest thing to do in China is get a win-win relationship."

All of this makes that Smithfield Foods deal a long shot – if the food standards don't kill it, the habitual US opposition to Chinese ownership will.

Unfortunately, this kind of opposition – the brutal, direct block – is the only leverage that the US government has with Chinese firms. As much as both sides feel wounded, they are also equally responsible for being suspicious of each other. If China could prove that it would maintain a US food company to US standards, it could probably get the deal done. Unfortunately, that kind of proof is hard to find. It may take years for trust – and mergers – to be established.